Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

INTELLECTUALITY AND SPIRITUALITY

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.

For some days he had been spiritually restless. His sterile mind flitted hither and thither like a butterfly. Nothing succeeded in interesting him. He picked up a book, read two or three pages and then had to close it again, unable to control his wandering attention. He tried to write, but half of the sheets that he wrote he tore up. And yet he had never enjoyed better health, never felt the blood coursing more vigorously through his veins, or the heart and lungs working in better unison. At the same time he had a premonition of something strong and mature within himself striving to come to birth; he felt that he was on the verge of bringing forth thoughts brimful of vitality and splendour. But something, a kind of solemn calm, against which he contended in vain, encompassed and paralysed him. It was no doubt sheer insensibility in him not to wait in peace for the grace of the Spirit to visit him but to seek to force it with violence.

At last, one afternoon, when the light of the setting sun was pouring upon the wide balcony of his cell-like room, he shut himself up in it, with its dumb books, with all its familiar objects the sight of which was always grateful to him. It was like shutting himself up within himself, or even better than that, for this wonted ambience served him as a means of communion with the world. That square glass inkstand, those fat pen-holders, that carpet, that stout leather arm-chair in which his body rested while his mind went galloping away, those rough plain chairs, those rows of books against the white naked walls: all these things were a kind of prolongation of his spirit and at the same time they were like arms which the world stretched out to enfold him in. They belonged to him and yet they belonged also to the world; they were himself and at the same they were the not-himself. They would not deceive him, no. He had touched them once and a thousand times and every touch had linked itself with all the other touches, until at last these things of humble use had become invested with a kind of soul made up of the outpourings of spirit and memories.

He had books that were like lovers, grateful, remembering, for whenever he opened them at random they opened themselves of their own accord at the same place, always offering him the same passage, the choicest, the most intense, the most life-giving that they had to offer. And when he read the passage over again, the intimate ambience of the peaceful room yielded up the memory of all the other fugitive moments when he had read it before, and his soul vibrated across the gulf of time until its vibrations were lost in that remoteness of the past where consciousness loses itself too.

From the balcony of his room, across red roofs stained here and there with the green of lichen, he could just glimpse the clouds glowing in the sunset light. And nearer at hand, along the eaves of the roof opposite, the white stone-crop blossomed, its tiny flowerets nourishing their life upon the moist earthy sediment washed down by the rain from the sun-baked clay tiles and deposited in the guttering. In summer, pigeons flew down from the neighbouring belfry to bill and coo upon the roof, picking the seeds of the stone-crop at its edge, while the dark swifts skimmed through the air above. Sometimes cats crept stealthily with sinuous movement across the tiles. Upon this roof too his eyes had often rested; the little wild garden in the gutter, the pigeons, the swifts, the cats, these too belonged to him and at the same time to the world; and often while he had held them in his gaze his mind had been intent upon his innermost thoughts.

He shut himself up there in his study, like an oyster in its shell. He untethered his mind, letting it roam at will, without spur or bridle. For a time it wandered up and down, plucking at passing ideas, ranging over the backs of the books and divining famous names and titles of renown. Then it collected itself and withdrew into the body that it animated and made use of, and presently the arm of this body reached out for a sheet of paper and the eyes glanced over it.

It was the strident manifesto that had been so much talked about; it was the famous composition into which he, he himself, who was now sitting at ease in his cow-hide arm-chair, had emptied his spirit. He began to read it, and as he read it a strange disquiet invaded him. No, that was not his, that was not what he had thought and believed, that was not what he had written. And yet there could be no doubt about it. That, that which now seemed so strange to him, he had written that, and it had increased his fame. He read it over again.

No, we do not communicate what we want to communicate, he reflected. No sooner does a thought incarnate itself in words and issue forth into the world than it belongs to someone not ourself, or rather it belongs to nobody because it belongs to everybody. The flesh with which language clothes itself is communal and external; it wizens up thought, it imprisons it and even reverses and falsifies it.

It was a singular and disturbing effect that was produced in him by reading himself as if he were a stranger, as if his writing had been written by someone else. This effect of the duplication of his personality reminded him of a former experience of self-duplication which he never recalled without a shudder. Once when gazing at the reflection of his own gaze in a mirror he had the sensation of seeing himself as someone else; he regarded himself as an unsubstantial shadow, as an impalpable phantom, and this alarmed him to such a degree that he called to himself softly by his own name. And his voice sounded to him as if it were the voice of another, a voice which came forth out of space, out of the invisible, out of impenetrable mystery. He cleared his throat, touched himself, felt the quickened beating of his heart. He had never forgotten that unforgettable experience.